BRITISH ENTERPRISE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 April 1938, Page 5

BRITISH ENTERPRISE

ASTOUNDING FIGURES. ' The British Post Office has its share of big undertaking figures. On the two days before Christmas, 1936, it handled 200,000.000 letters and 5,500,000 parcels and employed 80.000 extra men. We know, however, that these huge public utilities have no monopoly of, large-scale enterprise in Great Britain. A great engineering works like Metropolitan Vickers in Manchester has 10 miles of standard gauge railway line within its workshops. Works such as Metropolitan Vickers or Cadbury Brothers have canteens capable of serving a hot lunch to something like 5000 employees at a time. Cadburys, at Bournville, use 100 tons of sugar a day. Well, perhaps you expect that, but they also use 20,000,000 gallons of milk a year, which represents a full-time job for some 38,000 cows on some 1500 farms. And as for cocoa tins —imagine nine machines turning out just the lib containers, each machine turning out 27,000 tins per day. They have over 10,000 employees at Bournville. not so many as at Metropolitan Vickers, but it is, nevertheless, a tremendous number of people working-on the same premises together.